I suck in my chest and tighten the buckles before getting lightheaded. I don’t have to wear the costume anymore, but it seems disrespectful to leave it in the closet for this one last mission. I get the boots on and struggle with the leather straps and silver buckles until my fingers feel like they’re ready to fall off. I surrender and creak back up to standing position. “Ok screw the boot buckles, Jim,” I whisper. “This is it.”

I glance at the open briefcase laid across the corner of my desk but I’ve got everything I need. I pick up the silver frame with the little black and white photo of me, Frida, Alex, Paul, and Steve in our original Liberty League getup. Frida Freedom called me four hours ago. Her voice broke when she said the words, “Alex is dead.” I drop the frame into the case atop a weathered manila folder then close the whole thing up before hobbling out towards the waiting jet.

Rated PG. Contains some profanity, some violence, and strong rhetoric.

“So why did you agree to meet?” Tuesday asked, her Keds back on the
black and white tile floor.

Samuel paused while the waitress plunked down two glasses, followed by
big metal milk shake tumblers. His strawberry milkshake looked as thick
as cement. Damn, did he love this place.

“Professor Berry said there was an easy way to prove him wrong: meet
with you on and off for a week. If the city’s accident rate didn’t go
down when we were together, and back up when we were apart, he’d return
his consulting fee to the city.” The shake made a satisfying plopping
sound as he poured it into the glass. “His ideas are wacked. ‘Data
mining for non-intuitive connections?’ You can smell the bullshit from
three pastures away.”

Every now and then we strike it rich. Usually we make a profit. Once in a while we just break even. There’s only been one world where we actually lost money; I still remember it — Greenwillow. Except that it wasn’t green, and there wasn’t a willow on the whole damned planet.

There was a robot, though. We found him, me and the Baroni, in a barn, half-hidden under a pile of ancient computer parts and self-feeders for mutated cattle. We were picking through the stuff, wondering if there was any market for it, tossing most of it aside, when the sun peeked in through the doorway and glinted off a prismatic eye.

“Hey, take a look at what we’ve got here,” I said. “Give me a hand digging it out.”

I raise my hand and she stops chattering. “Just tell me who you are and where I am.”

She freezes and blinks twice. “Tell you where you are? Cap, you’re home. This is the Cleveland Pyramid. I’m Sarah Shadow. You don’t recognize me?”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me!” I stand up. Frustration washes over me like heat from a blast furnace, and worse, my stomach is rumbling. “I woke up today. The first person I saw was you, but I’ve never seen you before in my life. I figured as long as I was in the hospital, or wherever, I’d start to remember, but it’s a blank. Where am I, what is this place, what are you people?” I point at her costume. “And that, what’s that, are you part of a circus act or something?”

“Okay,” said Fishbait. He tossed a ball to the Big Guy.
“Let’s try a little one-on-one. Ralph, let’s see what you can do
against Jacko here.”

The Big Guy took a look at me, his face totally
expressionless. I moved forward to lean on him a little, just
enough to make contact and see which way he was going to move
when he began his drive to the basket, but before I got close enough
to touch him he’d already raced by me and stuffed the ball through
the hoop.

If I just lay here they will get tired and leave. They can’t hurt me all that much; my body is too hard now, too strong. But I can’t let on that their kicks and punches don’t bother me or who knows what they’ll do next. So I’ll lay here, curled up in the grass like some lump of igneous rock cast from a far away volcano.

“You fat assed son of a bitch! Talk to Loreen again and I’ll kill you! You understand me? I’ll beat your fat lazy ass to death!”

I bet his foot is starting to ache. My stomach is big, but it’s not soft. Not anymore. Not since last month when the change happened. We don’t have a lot of money so my wardrobe is still designed for a three hundred pound teenager, the kind with an almost unnatural love for pizza and potato chips. I still sort of look the same. But I am different, I can feel it. The rolls of flab that once encircled my belly and back are nearly gone, replaced by rippling muscle. My arms and legs are like tree trunks. I could rip Scott’s arms and legs off and beat his torso like a kettledrum. Well, if I wasn’t terrified.

Gruen was on the sixty-first master, and while his wisdom had
grown steadily, he had worn very little. He was incredibly
well-preserved–the palms of his three-fingered hands still sported the
deep, swirling ridges that had worn to nothing in most people before
they’d lived thirty years. Indeed, all of the myriad folds and ridges
in his thick maroon skin were for the most part intact. His eyes were
still housed in tight sockets, surrounded by thickly-ridged cheeks.
Besides the feet, the eyes were the greatest point of weakness for those
who aspired to read the works of the masters. Ceaseless up-and-down eye
movement caused the sockets to wear out, and eventually the reader’s
eyes fell out. At that point they were forced to trace the carved words
with their fingers. Friction quickly took its toll on the hands;
readers rarely made it through one master’s teachings this way before
their hands were ground to the wrist, and they were finished.

Of course, even if we had met before, they couldn’t recognize me now. I know. I’ve spent almost three years trying to find out who I was before I got Erased — but along with what they did to my brain, they gave me a new face and wiped my fingerprints
clean. I’m a brand new man: two years, eleven months, and seventeen days old. I am (fanfare and trumpets, please!) William Jordan. Not a real catchy name, I’ll admit, but it’s the only one I’ve got these days.

I had another name once. They told me not to worry about it, that all my memories had been expunged and that I couldn’t dredge up a single fact no matter how hard I tried, not even if I took a little Sodium-P from a hypnotist, and after a few weeks I had to agree with them–which didn’t mean that I stopped trying.

So there you have him, Frederick Bannister, tripping across the highways and byways of of life, stubbing a toe here, bruising an elbow there, spilling this, dropping that, and managing to make it to the halfway point without too many major accomplishments or disasters.

And what of Wilma?

She possessed massive storage capacity, and no fourth-level equation, no matter how complex, was beyond her, but whether she was bright or merely well programmed is a moot point. Or at least it was in the beginning.

Rated X. Contains explicit sex of several kinds. Not recommended for younger audiences.